AIRPLANE, I

Hi. There’s so much I want to tell you, that I’ve been wanting to tell you my whole life long, my whole life long I’ve been wanting to tell you that I’ve been afraid that I have nothing to say, afraid I have nothing to say that you want to hear, have nothing to say that you can understand when you hear it.

AIRPLANE, II

Hi. Luckily that last airplane didn’t make it—what a piece of trash. I hope the street sweeper got it and churned it into the incinerator. I have something profound to say, of course I do.

AIRPLANE, III

Hi again. The last airplane didn’t make it, either, but I saw a child too young to read pick it up and unfold it with more care than his years and color a rainbow over it with his crayons. I was glad. Did you see that too, from your window?

AIRPLANE, IV

Hi again. I just have to keep trying, I suppose. What is it I’m trying to do? That’s a good place to start. I’m just trying to exist, that’s all. Somehow this body, this soul, these stories, these words, add up to something less than being. Flat form. I crave the dotted diagrams of origami: fold here, then here, then here.

AIRPLANE, V

From here your fingers look long and artistic and your head seems bald-shaven. You seem both young and old, but if you keep smoking so much you won’t be either.

AIRPLANE, VI

I’m trying to destroy the idea that the self is a healthy idea and put something new in its place. Or something shared. Or something free.

Do you think it’s possible that we share the same middle name? Mine’s —.

AIRPLANE, VII

I remember competing with my cousins on their back porch in Plymouth, Massachusetts, to see whose paper airplane could fly the farthest, trying out different aerodynamic features each flight, pretending at scientific rigor.

AIRPLANE, VIII

I remember coming across two spent and dusty paper airplanes in the plaza of a small Italian town during the siesta hour in summertime, while I was flirting with the idea of falling for a man not my husband.

AIRPLANE, IX

Could this be the one?

AIRPLANE, X

Why did I ever think this would work?

AIRPLANE, XI

You’ve receded from the window but it’s still open. Maybe this one will fly through. If it does, please reply!

AIRPLANE, XII

The Greeks and Romans had this idea, both scientific and magical, that everything in the world is connected through sympatheia—co-affectation.

I think that could be true. Do you?

AIRPLANE, XIII

Today I feel like giving up. I can’t do it. Make a virtue out of my vice, make freedom out of my lack of self. Look, see how much better it would be to have one? Any one—but especially a Good One. To have it, to hold it, to know it. To control it. To express it. A puppet, a mask of me, on a selfie stick turned outward, playing her part.

Instead here I am, stuck in one kind of nothingness— time, a body, which will at some point become another kind of nothingness— eternity, death.

AIRPLANE, XIV

It’s cold now, but we keep our windows cracked to check the boiling radiators. Today is a Friday that feels like a Monday. Getting started again, streets cleared of snow again, only to be pulled up abruptly by the weekend, by another freeze. Trying again.

AIRPLANE, XV

Monday again. The sun, blinding but not warm, is the accomplice of the glaring frost. A prism sprinkles rainbows on my white desk, the way I have seen you sprinkle birdseed for the pigeons. Your smile is beautiful when you do that.

You can’t see in here, during the daylight, only at night. So I’ll tell you: there’s books behind me and in front of me; the mirrored closet door to my right is folded open.  But it’s the prism in the window that I stare at, see myself in.

With the prism, Newton proved that light—clear, shining, chiaro—contains all the colors. “I saw the light,” we say of truth, revelation. As if to say, I saw all the colors of existence at once. I saw that which enables me to see, in the first place. Not objects, not reflections, not glowing screens— the light itself. Which is always at once one and many. Mostly we don’t see the light itself, yet when it arrives each morning it allows us to see everything else.

That’s how I want to be.

AIRPLANE, XVI

It’s been a while. I really must clean the window so I can see you better. You are watching the street below intently today, face propped on your fist. You seem to study it: the UPS truck, the break in the springtime drizzle, the crosswalk, the mom and her toddler, the red and green and red and green light. You disappear and reappear from the white-framed Vermeer gloom.

What do you see, I wonder? Where do you come from, that you have learned this deep and simple pastime, of staying in and looking out? The window is your TV, your phone, your books, your mirror, your discipline, your prayer. You look, you lean through. You disappear into the light.